RPF0425-Mr_Money_Mustache_Interview
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00:00:30.160 | Today's episode of Radical Personal Finance is brought to you by HelloFresh, the awesome meal delivery service for fresh food.
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00:00:46.960 | You know, I do a lot of interviews here on Radical Personal Finance, and if there's one person I've been asked to interview more than anybody else,
00:00:53.480 | I'd have to say that person is a man known online as Mr. Money Mustache.
00:01:01.320 | Well, it took two and a half years, but finally I tracked him down a couple of weeks ago at Camp Mustache Southeast 2017 in Gainesville, Florida.
00:01:10.320 | Sat down, pulled out my microphones and got a chance to talk to him about everything that he loves talking about.
00:01:18.320 | [Music]
00:01:34.320 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need
00:01:41.320 | to live a rich and meaningful life now while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:01:47.320 | My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today.
00:01:51.320 | Today we talk with the man who probably has been responsible for more people hitting that goal of financial freedom in 10 years or less than anyone I know about.
00:02:01.320 | [Music]
00:02:06.320 | Mr. Money Mustache has been a difficult guy to get on the show. He follows, he practices what he preaches.
00:02:12.320 | He really doesn't love to do big media tours, things like that. So even though we've interacted and whatnot before, I finally was able to get him on though, and I'm happy to do that.
00:02:21.320 | Now, the interview you're about to hear, though, for those of you who listen to other interviews, is going to be a little bit different.
00:02:25.320 | And actually, what I'm going to do is probably tomorrow's episode, but if not, very soon.
00:02:33.320 | I'm going to do an episode kind of detailing out the approach, the Mr. Money Mustache approach to money.
00:02:42.320 | Because in today's episode and interview, I promised him I was like, "We're not going to go through the same old, same old that you've done many times before."
00:02:48.320 | But I'll lay out for you the entire plan of everything that he teaches and the approaches and the suggestions that he makes so that those of you who are not familiar with his teaching and those of you who are not familiar with his approach
00:03:02.320 | will be able to have that information for you.
00:03:05.320 | I'll do that in a separate episode where I'll summarize it and do that. Probably tomorrow's episode, we'll see.
00:03:10.320 | If not, tomorrow's episode will be out this week.
00:03:12.320 | But that will give you the content.
00:03:14.320 | Today, though, I wanted to kind of introduce you to the man.
00:03:17.320 | And I tried to get a little bit different, a little bit behind the scenes and hear who he actually is and some of the things that he's even currently involved in.
00:03:30.320 | So, Mr. Money Mustache, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.
00:03:34.320 | Thanks. I'm not actually at Radical Personal Finance. I'm actually in Florida.
00:03:39.320 | Well, the great thing about Radical Personal Finance is that we're here in Gainesville, Florida at Camp Mustache Southeast 2017.
00:03:47.320 | How did these Mustachian events get started?
00:03:50.320 | I'm not sure. It may have been from magic.
00:03:53.320 | Some kind of. It didn't involve me too much, but it was some readers that had been around in the blog world, the world of my blog readership for a while.
00:04:04.320 | Yeah.
00:04:05.320 | And they were just kind of wondering. They liked each other in real life and they were wondering if there was a better way to get together as friends and with a bunch of other readers.
00:04:14.320 | So they organized. The first group of organizers created something in Florida.
00:04:19.320 | And because they had the similar sense of humor to me, they called it Camp Mustache and they rented out this lodge just outside of Seattle.
00:04:28.320 | It was actually like mostly used by religious groups, which made it kind of an interesting, like, you know, vibe that you wouldn't get from a normal commercial venue.
00:04:36.320 | More peaceful, maybe. Yeah. And then they just set out, set up a website and sold tickets at kind of an at cost basis.
00:04:45.320 | And I just shared that on the blog or the Twitter account in some way.
00:04:50.320 | And it didn't take much to get 50 people to sign up. And it was so much fun that it repeated for two more years or three more years.
00:04:58.320 | And this the one we're at right now is probably technically Camp Mustache 4, because it's like an intra year.
00:05:05.320 | You know, it's a halfway between three and five.
00:05:08.320 | But it's you've done a great job of kind of, I mean, you joke about it, but under the misty, runny mustache umbrella, you joke that you've created a leaderless cult.
00:05:18.320 | But it kind of feels like that. It kind of feels like everyone here shares the same perspective, the same lifestyle, many similar goals, etc.
00:05:27.320 | Yeah, it's a bunch of really, really interesting, highly accomplished people that generally like working hard in general.
00:05:34.320 | So that makes for a really fun group because they often have a hard time finding people with the same interests as them.
00:05:40.320 | So when you put people like this together, they're really excited.
00:05:43.320 | And because the reviews are so universally positive, that results in one event leading to another event, which leads to another event.
00:05:51.320 | And there's always more people than you have room for, which is a great thing. Right.
00:05:55.320 | And that because it's self perpetuating, that's why you don't need a leader, because it's fun in its own right.
00:06:00.320 | There's no central marketing agency saying, come to the Camp Mustache TM branded events and revolutionize your life.
00:06:07.320 | And by the way, by these DVDs and course sets and stuff like that, there's no, you know, there's nobody doing that.
00:06:12.320 | It's just anybody who wants to organize one is free to get in touch with the existing organizers who presumably know the magic formula.
00:06:20.320 | And if you are cool with them, then you get kind of the approval of the group and then another one can form.
00:06:26.320 | You've built over the years this just truly remarkable brand that has impacted so many people's lives.
00:06:33.320 | But yet you treat the whole thing in this very laid back manner.
00:06:37.320 | You come across and in many ways is very low key and very laid back. Was that intentional?
00:06:44.320 | It's not just an act. It's really I object to the I really object to the phrase you have built a brand or any of this stuff.
00:06:52.320 | You know, that business people are going to face punch me now. Yeah, well, I know it's meant in good, you know, in good faith.
00:06:58.320 | But it's like I haven't built a business or a brand like I've just occasionally typed some shit into the computer.
00:07:04.320 | That's my official phrase. That's a trade. My trademark trade was mild profanity and all.
00:07:09.320 | Because really, like it's I just like the idea of honestly sharing thoughts.
00:07:14.320 | And sure, I work hard on stuff like hard work is still one of my core values, even though I'm supposedly retired.
00:07:21.320 | And I sometimes I work hard to do research or make an article as good as I can.
00:07:26.320 | But it's really not a job. And I'm not thinking about a brand or.
00:07:29.320 | But I am, of course, really thrilled that a lot of people are interested in the ideas.
00:07:33.320 | So it's very rewarding for for me. But there's really no magic in it.
00:07:39.320 | You know, it's very part time thing. And it's just kind of a miracle that the ideas happen to stick to a certain portion of society.
00:07:46.320 | Do you remember the date at which you first hit publish on the first Mr. Money Mustache blog post?
00:07:53.320 | Well, I know it was approximately April, like early April of the year 2011.
00:07:58.320 | So that's almost six years now. Yeah.
00:08:02.320 | In the last six years, what to you has been the most surprising thing about the growth of the Mr. Money Mustache website and community?
00:08:11.320 | Just the fact that it exists at all. You know, just any the fact that it's more than just me and a few Facebook friends having some chuckles.
00:08:18.320 | As soon as strangers start showing up on your blog and commenting, you're realized, wow, this is people that I never met before.
00:08:27.320 | And yet they're reading this stuff. And then the more that happens, then the more amazing it is.
00:08:32.320 | And especially if it's people that you might have heard of for other reasons, you know, like the leader, you know, the founder of whatever company.
00:08:40.320 | You might happen to like and they're like, oh, I read your blog. And then you're like, what?
00:08:44.320 | Like, oh, that's also adds pressure and embarrassment because you're like, man, I really respect that person.
00:08:49.320 | And now I can't be as silly or I can't make as many mistakes because this person is obviously more accomplished than me and smarter is reading this stuff.
00:08:57.320 | Right. So that's kind of it's a positive and a negative.
00:09:00.320 | And it's kind of a writer's trap because writers often have a problem of self filtering and your work quality goes down when you're too afraid to write.
00:09:09.320 | You're afraid of making something bad. So I'm still dealing with that.
00:09:13.320 | I felt that super intensely myself, too. I, I, I like to meet listeners, but it also scares me to meet listeners because they're like, oh, I listen to your stuff.
00:09:23.320 | Like, oh, but I said this and I said that and I said this and I said that. And that was in this public format where in person I don't know anything about you.
00:09:31.320 | I would filter what I would say to somebody based upon hearing more about them.
00:09:35.320 | But you don't get that luxury when you put all your thoughts out there for people just to consume freely.
00:09:39.320 | Yeah. And luckily, people are more forgiving than you think they are.
00:09:43.320 | So, I mean, if they even bothered to come and say hi in real life, that means they didn't mind too much of what you said earlier.
00:09:49.320 | So you just got to do your best. And there's everyone knows, like all the people who have been in the public eye before us have been in the same, had the same problems and advantages.
00:10:00.320 | So, you know, you're not alone. Right. So it's nothing to stress about. It's a lot of fun.
00:10:04.320 | I'm far more understanding and forgiving of public figures than I ever was before I got into this space.
00:10:09.320 | Yeah, I was so critical of people before and I'm quite humbled.
00:10:13.320 | Right. And you can now realize that a lot of the conspiracy theories and negative stuff that are said about public figures are quite likely wrong.
00:10:21.320 | Because if you've ever read stuff about yourself on, let's say, an Internet forum or the comments section of your own blog or like the newspaper article that might mention you and stuff that's really, really wrong, like completely off base, nothing to do with reality.
00:10:37.320 | And they're saying about it, about you, and they believe it's true. And they're like, I've figured out what Mr. Money Mustache is real gig is he's really doing this.
00:10:45.320 | He doesn't even live this life. He's saying it's all like, yeah, sure. He lives on not a much spending per year.
00:10:50.320 | Like and it's just completely false. But they're saying it about you. So anyway, that therefore it must be true about every other prominent person.
00:10:57.320 | A lot of the speculation must be wrong. Before you started writing and actually publishing your writing, did you ever read a personal finance blog?
00:11:08.320 | No, I didn't know they existed. I thought I thought this is a neat idea. I'm going to write something about money. Ha ha ha.
00:11:15.320 | It's the greatest invention thing to do with the Internet. Yeah. I'm going to tell people how to handle their own money.
00:11:23.320 | Guess what? First idea ever. But yeah, that's because I've never been like particularly voracious consumer of Internet stuff.
00:11:30.320 | And I shot my cut myself off of TV long ago, like 1999 or something. And I focused on like close relationships with people I know.
00:11:38.320 | And then I read a lot of nonfiction stuff. And so and I have I still have a lot of opinions about money.
00:11:45.320 | And so once I came up with this supposedly unique idea, I went over to the Google and typed early retirement frugality.
00:11:53.320 | And then the first result was early retirement extreme. Jacob Fisk Fisker. And then I was like, what? Oh, no.
00:12:01.320 | Early retirement extreme. That sounds a lot like what I did a while ago. And then I started reading his blog and it was intelligent and well thought out.
00:12:08.320 | And it had been out for years and had all these topics covered and all these existing readers.
00:12:12.320 | And I was like, crap, well, I guess I can't do mine because it's, you know, it's no point doing something that already exists on the Internet.
00:12:19.320 | And then but then my wife kind of convinced me to still do it. And also, the more of Jacob's blog, blog I read,
00:12:25.320 | the more I realized, like I still had some different stuff to contribute, different attitude as well.
00:12:31.320 | So I still did it. And I'm glad I did, because it has led to six years of fun.
00:12:36.320 | But then I discovered this personal finance gurus like this, the whole Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman and other people.
00:12:42.320 | I didn't know they existed either. And, you know, I read a couple of their books, too.
00:12:46.320 | And, you know, I saw the differences in advice. And then I learned to live like it's fine.
00:12:52.320 | It's fine not to be the only one. There's a space for anybody who wants to talk about some stuff.
00:12:58.320 | Now, I know. And I guess my guess is, you know, this, but I know because I was a longtime consumer of personal finance.
00:13:04.320 | I think your work has fundamentally changed much of how people talk about finance.
00:13:09.320 | Do you perceive that? Do you notice that? Have you seen that yourself?
00:13:13.320 | No, because I didn't know what was going on before this supposedly momentous arrival of me.
00:13:19.320 | And I don't know what's going on after because I still don't read those things.
00:13:22.320 | But I'm I'm excited that you say that, you know, if something has changed because of Mr.
00:13:27.320 | Money Mustache, then hopefully it's stuff that I approve of. And like I if I had to guess what it was,
00:13:32.320 | maybe it's because maybe it's that people are talking more about money as a source of freedom and and
00:13:39.320 | and taking bigger steps instead of just, oh, can you save five to 10 percent if you really cut back?
00:13:44.320 | And instead it's like, let's just blow the whole thing up and call it tell it like it is and say, oh, well,
00:13:51.320 | almost all the spending we do is optional. So it's that therefore it's totally in your control.
00:13:55.320 | So you can save way more than 10 percent of your income. And for people with high incomes,
00:14:00.320 | that could easily be 75 percent of your income. And nobody apparently nobody really said that very often before.
00:14:06.320 | No, I would I would characterize that as is absolutely accurate. You push you change the goalpost goalpost.
00:14:11.320 | You change the frame. So, you know, obviously in psychology, you have this framing mechanism where you have choice,
00:14:17.320 | a choice, be in choice. See if they're all very similar to one another,
00:14:20.320 | then people are going to make the choice that's right in the middle.
00:14:23.320 | But when you stretch the poles out and move a and C very far apart,
00:14:28.320 | B, where they actually choose is going to is going to be different.
00:14:31.320 | And so you come along and you say, well, why don't you say 80 percent of your income?
00:14:35.320 | And people who are thinking about, oh, can I say five percent or seven percent?
00:14:39.320 | I'm really, really want to cut back on my eating out. It completely changes people's heads.
00:14:43.320 | And in some ways, I feel like that gets right past all the filters that gets right in and causes people to really analyze in a deep way what's important to them.
00:14:52.320 | Nice. And nowadays, a lot of these business books advise that in any field.
00:14:57.320 | They're not there. They're like 10 X. You're thinking or think if you think you can do something in 10 years, try in six months.
00:15:04.320 | How would you do it if you had to do it in six months? So. So, yeah, maybe I accidentally did that, which is now everybody's saying it's a good business idea.
00:15:11.320 | So, yeah. Hooray for that accident. I moved the B point of all the articles that you've published.
00:15:17.320 | Are there any that you regret or that you go back now and say, if I were going to write this again today, I'd write it differently?
00:15:22.320 | There's probably a lot. I haven't looked at my early articles for a while and I'm kind of in the process of fixing a few of them.
00:15:29.320 | And they definitely qualify for that. And I've been taking some down because they're totally irrelevant now or at least changing the tone.
00:15:36.320 | Like I had one early one on like early on how cheap health insurance is for high deductible health insurance.
00:15:43.320 | And it was kind of snarky, like maybe even more than I am now. And and it's and it became totally irrelevant because the health care market in the US changed.
00:15:51.320 | And I probably softened on my views of like, you know, how likely medical care is for a healthy person.
00:15:58.320 | It's more healthy. It's more likely than I had assumed. So.
00:16:03.320 | So, yeah, I just took that whole one down, for example. And then and I just present more facts, fact based information instead of attitudes on the on the idea of health insurance.
00:16:12.320 | And there's a couple other things like that. And it'll it'll it's hard when you have four hundred and seventy articles written over six years.
00:16:20.320 | It's hard for them all to be useful today. So I kind of have a disclaimer at the beginning that says, OK,
00:16:27.320 | you're going to hit some articles if you're going through all of these that are going to be useless.
00:16:32.320 | And if you if they are just maybe send me a quick note suggesting I take this one down.
00:16:36.320 | And in the long run, we'll make it a little better. But, you know, it's a log.
00:16:40.320 | Right. Blog means a web log, which means like a historical trail of stuff you were thinking about over the years.
00:16:46.320 | Which article is the most popular? Probably the one that I just the ones that are mentioned on the front page of the blog,
00:16:53.320 | because so many new people come and they see. So there's one that I say, start here and you click on it.
00:16:58.320 | And then it is called Getting Rich from Zero to Hero in one blog post.
00:17:03.320 | And then it just goes on to say, hi, I'm Mr. Mustache. And this is this weird life I live.
00:17:07.320 | And here's the things you can read about if you're interested in doing the same kind of stuff yourself.
00:17:13.320 | That one probably has the biggest number of total times it's been read.
00:17:17.320 | And then close seconds are like the shockingly simple math to early retirement,
00:17:21.320 | because it's kind of lodged itself in the Internet in Google search results.
00:17:26.320 | Well, it says the answer to how how fast can I retire or what does the so-called 4 percent rule mean?
00:17:34.320 | A lot of people searching for those things get to that article. So those are maybe the top two.
00:17:40.320 | Hey, Radicals, back to the interview in just a moment. But first, let's talk about food for a moment.
00:17:45.320 | It's always a good time to talk about food, right?
00:17:47.320 | In my household, one of the challenges that my wife and I have is that I love to cook and she doesn't.
00:17:56.320 | But on the other challenges, it often makes more sense for her to cook than it does for me,
00:18:02.320 | because she doesn't enjoy cooking and I really love to cook. I do a lot of the cooking.
00:18:06.320 | But there are also times when I'm busy doing the show and she's got to be the one to step up and cook.
00:18:12.320 | And we've tried to figure out what would be a really great frugal way to get a personal private chef.
00:18:20.320 | I think that would be awesome to have, just be a private chef, someone who could cook.
00:18:24.320 | That way we could eat great food. Somebody else is doing most of the work of designing it and coming up with the menu, et cetera.
00:18:31.320 | But unfortunately, I haven't felt that it's time to start spending money on a private chef yet.
00:18:36.320 | So what are the options between her and I just doing it all and figuring it all out from scratch and actually getting a private chef?
00:18:45.320 | Well, last week, a big cardboard box showed up with the UPS guy.
00:18:50.320 | He knocks on the door, take the box, pull it open.
00:18:53.320 | Inside the box, there's a nice cooler and I pull it open and there are boxes of food.
00:18:58.320 | The boxes of food had neat little labels on it.
00:19:01.320 | It had sesame chicken noodles and classic poblano beef chili and Parmesan crusted cod with herd potatoes and carrots.
00:19:09.320 | It was a delivery from my friends at HelloFresh.
00:19:12.320 | They sent me over a box of the food.
00:19:14.320 | And so all last week, what we did for dinner every night was we made HelloFresh meals.
00:19:19.320 | Now, if you're not familiar with it, it's super cool.
00:19:21.320 | HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service.
00:19:25.320 | They ship out to your box all of the ingredients, everything pre-measured, pre-figured out, pre-packaged to the exact quantities you need.
00:19:34.320 | So if you want to make dinner and you open up one box, everything is right there, fresh vegetables, sauces, everything is right there.
00:19:41.320 | And grab the instructions and in 30 minutes or so, you got a home-cooked meal.
00:19:46.320 | Super convenient because everything is all pre-measured and very fast to put together.
00:19:50.320 | HelloFresh plans that all their meals take about 30 minutes to make.
00:19:54.320 | So you're cooking from scratch, but you're cooking from a recipe with everything all ready to go.
00:20:00.320 | Tell you what, my wife's hooked.
00:20:03.320 | She loved it.
00:20:05.320 | Said the best thing about it was not having to go to the refrigerator at 5.30 in the evening and figure out what to make.
00:20:11.320 | You just go and grab a box and cooking and 30 minutes later, dinner is on the table.
00:20:15.320 | If you'd like to try HelloFresh, go to HelloFresh.com.
00:20:18.320 | Enter the promo code RPF.
00:20:21.320 | Again, RPF for radical personal finance.
00:20:24.320 | HelloFresh.com. Use the promo code RPF to save $35 off your first week of food delivery.
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00:20:36.320 | One thing I admire about you is that you don't stand still.
00:20:40.320 | You continue the way that you've become who you are as you've always taken on new things, tried new things, tried new experiments.
00:20:47.320 | And that's continued over the course of your blogging.
00:20:50.320 | So I know last year you were doing a lot of things with electric bicycles and kind of experimenting with different things.
00:20:56.320 | What are some of your areas of interest and focus where you're experimenting right now?
00:21:01.320 | It's very complimentary.
00:21:03.320 | Well, it's not--it's a pretty slow rate of innovation because I'm very--this whole occasionally type stuff into the computer thing I mentioned before.
00:21:13.320 | The blog I work on is very much a hobby.
00:21:15.320 | It's not a business.
00:21:16.320 | So I'm mainly a dad.
00:21:17.320 | I'm mainly taking care of family and friends in my area.
00:21:20.320 | So in the limited time I have to work, I study new stuff that I'm interested in.
00:21:25.320 | So, for example, electric bikes, electric cars.
00:21:28.320 | I bought an electric car and I'm keeping track of its reliability and how useful it is in real life.
00:21:34.320 | And the next thing I actually want to do is kind of reveal how ridiculously cheap and simple solar power is, like solar electricity for your house.
00:21:44.320 | Because everybody is--most people aren't like lifetime electrical engineering nerds.
00:21:49.320 | Like to me, I read stuff about solar power before I go to bed and just go to bed with a warm heart.
00:21:53.320 | I'm like, "Oh, that's so cool.
00:21:55.320 | I can't believe you can have a 17% solar panel that only weighs like 13 kilograms and all this stuff."
00:22:00.320 | And other people are like, "Solar power?
00:22:01.320 | Yeah, I hear that's okay."
00:22:03.320 | And as a result, the solar market in the U.S. is fractured and expensive and people are like, "Should I get solar on my house?"
00:22:10.320 | I called a contractor and they said it'd be 30 grand and all this other complex like lease or buy.
00:22:15.320 | And none of that is true.
00:22:16.320 | All it is is like you buy these sheets of black glass that cost like less than $100 each and a few of them will power your house forever.
00:22:24.320 | And they'll charge your electric car.
00:22:26.320 | And if you take away all the fat and the complexity--and I want to make an article that really lays it out--and the numbers of this--
00:22:33.320 | and again, I'm a solar nerd.
00:22:34.320 | Not everybody is going to be excited about this.
00:22:36.320 | But the numbers of it is that it can pretty much immediately replace almost all the world's power generation, even with today's technology.
00:22:42.320 | And the only thing stopping us from doing this is that most people don't know this yet.
00:22:48.320 | They don't know the numbers behind it.
00:22:50.320 | So I want to help to accelerate that, the spread of that knowledge and get people excited about it.
00:22:54.320 | Like, "Hey, I own a car dealership," or "I own a warehouse.
00:22:58.320 | I could just throw some of these things on the roof and generate $200,000 a year of electricity.
00:23:03.320 | It's going to be more than the value of the business inside," or whatever.
00:23:07.320 | And so anything I can do to speed that up will be my next little experimental frontier.
00:23:13.320 | What about the embedded energy in the manufacture of solar panels?
00:23:17.320 | I've heard that this is one of the major challenges.
00:23:19.320 | There's so much energy embedded at the beginning that it dramatically changes.
00:23:24.320 | Certainly it can be convenient, but it does change the actual impact.
00:23:27.320 | Do you have any insight on that?
00:23:28.320 | Yeah, I do.
00:23:29.320 | I mean, it's one of the common misconceptions, and one of these things I kind of want to wipe away.
00:23:35.320 | It's tiny compared to the amount of power these things generate.
00:23:38.320 | Like, sure, it takes a little bit of energy, but let's say you buy a solar panel that's $100.
00:23:42.320 | You know that there's not going to be more than $100 of embedded energy in that thing
00:23:46.320 | because it would have cost more than $100 to make.
00:23:49.320 | And the truth is that it's actually a very small amount,
00:23:52.320 | and within a couple months of running this thing, you've already paid back its manufacturing deficit,
00:23:57.320 | and then you're in pure profit, and then the panels last like 25 or 30 years,
00:24:01.320 | and they're like profit, profit, profit the whole time.
00:24:04.320 | And not only that, but there's also a massive energy cost to making any other thing that produces electricity,
00:24:10.320 | like a coal power plant takes up a huge amount of cement to make,
00:24:13.320 | and it takes a huge amount of coal, of course, to make the electricity on an ongoing basis,
00:24:17.320 | and freight cars are going, burning diesel, all this stuff.
00:24:20.320 | So solar panels are very, very lightweight.
00:24:22.320 | It's like a feather light.
00:24:23.320 | It's almost like these things that have rained down from heaven, like produced by another supreme alien being,
00:24:30.320 | and they're like, "Here, humans, have free electricity."
00:24:33.320 | It's like almost no cost.
00:24:35.320 | Have you done a system on your house currently?
00:24:38.320 | I have something on the way.
00:24:40.320 | I've made friends with a solar electrician in Colorado, and we worked out what we're going to do.
00:24:44.320 | Awesome.
00:24:45.320 | And it's just in the next month or two, we'll do the first bit of it.
00:24:49.320 | Awesome. I'll be excited to see that.
00:24:51.320 | Is there anything else that you're working on that is really exciting right now for you?
00:24:54.320 | I don't know.
00:24:56.320 | I have a lot of backlog of things I'm excited to tell people about, like partially written articles, like about 200 of them.
00:25:03.320 | And so I'm like, yeah.
00:25:05.320 | Well, your current publishing rate is like once a month, so that's --
00:25:07.320 | Yeah, so I have 200 months of backlog.
00:25:09.320 | Hooray.
00:25:10.320 | You'll be hearing from me for at least the next 17 years.
00:25:14.320 | So, yeah, a lot of it is related to green tech and construction and neat stuff.
00:25:21.320 | Like I made a building in my backyard, and it was the first time I have ever made something from scratch,
00:25:27.320 | like right down to renting the digger to dig the foundation and then making my own forms out of reinforced plywood to pour with a cement truck.
00:25:35.320 | And so I want that to come into -- to become a how to make a house from scratch type of post, like right from everything,
00:25:44.320 | and then you can pick which ones you'd really want to do yourself.
00:25:46.320 | So all kinds of stuff.
00:25:48.320 | Like in real life, I'm always -- if I'm not being a dad, then I'm building stuff, because that's what really brings me joy.
00:25:53.320 | I'm like tinkering in my yard and like literally doing construction and all these trades.
00:25:57.320 | So that's kind of my true passion.
00:25:59.320 | But I don't always write about it because I don't have a do-it-yourself blog.
00:26:03.320 | It's more like a financial independence blog.
00:26:05.320 | So --
00:26:06.320 | How are you working right now to teach your son about money and financial independence?
00:26:12.320 | I wrote a post once called "How I Teach" or "What I'm Teaching My Son About Money," and it's fairly low-key.
00:26:19.320 | I feel he's already got it.
00:26:21.320 | He's absorbed the concepts, and now we're just waiting for him to grow up to need money, because he knows how to earn it.
00:26:28.320 | He knows the basics of entrepreneurship and being efficient with your money and judging each purchase before you make it.
00:26:38.320 | And I think he's on a solid path.
00:26:40.320 | He's accumulating his own little cute stash of money in the bank of dad, and I pay him interest on it, and he decides how to spend it and how to earn it.
00:26:48.320 | And one of the big things that's perhaps unusual is my wife and I both have really gotten into this post-career entrepreneurship where you start a little business.
00:27:00.320 | I've done house building and carpentry, and now there's this blog and some consulting work I've done.
00:27:06.320 | And she has done real estate and accounting work and some Etsy shops that she runs now.
00:27:12.320 | All kinds of super fun ways to make money that do not involve having a job, and not to bash the traditional model, because I follow the get a fancy university degree and then get a fancy job.
00:27:24.320 | And that's still going to be a big part of the economy, but it's absolutely optional.
00:27:28.320 | And if you are a square peg type person who doesn't like following rules, which as a gift or a curse to my son, I feel like he might be one of those too,
00:27:38.320 | you might have a lot more fun just going straight to entrepreneurship, even in high school, and then just growing from there.
00:27:44.320 | Because it really is almost literally raining money out there once you start to see all these places that people make money.
00:27:52.320 | And it's mostly opened up by the internet and things like YouTube and free education and easy selling platforms and sharing economy, peer-to-peer stuff.
00:28:02.320 | It's just business, business, business. And if you're a technical master and a creative semi-wizard and somewhat hardworking, that seems to be the best path to earning your own money.
00:28:13.320 | So my son has something that was not invented when I was even 20 years old. It wasn't there yet.
00:28:20.320 | One of the best things too is our circle of acquaintance today can be so much larger than it was in the past.
00:28:27.320 | In the past, if you were fortunate enough to know the old guy in your neighborhood that was always finding interesting ways to make money,
00:28:34.320 | that person may have been inspiring to you, but you would only have run into him if he was in your neighborhood.
00:28:40.320 | But today, with the internet, the work that I'm doing, you, many, many people are doing, one of the things I'm seeking to do is to profile people like that
00:28:46.320 | and bring their experiences to a broader range of people.
00:28:50.320 | So then you have all these people who can look at that and say, "Wow, I don't want to do exactly that,
00:28:55.320 | but here's how I can take some of that concept, use the resources that are near and around me in my own neighborhood."
00:29:02.320 | So it's really exciting.
00:29:03.320 | Yeah, you're definitely right. And that has made it a big shortcut for anybody to learn new skills and to find a market for their products.
00:29:10.320 | So both mentors are easier to find, but customers are easier to find too.
00:29:14.320 | And it also has created really big flows of money in different directions that were not there before.
00:29:22.320 | So it's both leveling the playing field in terms of opening it up,
00:29:26.320 | and it's also creating more inequality in some other ways,
00:29:29.320 | because the people who are on top of this field can go very quickly from broke to really, really, really high income.
00:29:36.320 | Like the guy who created the little phone app video game or website video game called Slither.io.
00:29:42.320 | It's just this cute little snake game with very artsy graphics.
00:29:46.320 | It was his first thing he ever developed.
00:29:48.320 | I read this in the Wall Street Journal, so I might not get my facts totally right,
00:29:51.320 | but within a very short time, it was making $100,000 a day in sales from a single man operation.
00:29:57.320 | So that's $3 million per month, not per year, for your first product,
00:30:02.320 | which is comprised of less work than you would spend in one year of software engineering at a big company,
00:30:08.320 | which might pay you $100,000 per year instead of per day.
00:30:12.320 | So this is a really amazing new economy with weird, weird money flows that didn't exist before.
00:30:19.320 | It's fun to get involved with, and it'll probably get slowed down and regulated more in the future,
00:30:24.320 | but for now, it's kind of a fun Wild West to enjoy,
00:30:27.320 | especially if you practice it ethically, because there are people discovering these flows of money
00:30:33.320 | and using them and just harvesting them in pretty shady ways as well.
00:30:36.320 | So if you can be one of the good guys harvesting money for something that delivers value to society,
00:30:41.320 | that's probably helping to make the Wild West a better place.
00:30:46.320 | Absolutely. So the last thing I want to ask you is this.
00:30:49.320 | Something I struggle with is knowing how to integrate the way we live,
00:30:56.320 | the resources that we have in a U.S.-American context into a global context.
00:31:02.320 | I think some things transfer, but it's been my experience traveling and living abroad that other things don't transfer.
00:31:09.320 | For example, it's very easy for you, and I think rightfully so,
00:31:13.320 | to take this kind of snarky approach and say, "Look, there's money falling all over the place.
00:31:17.320 | We live in the land of plenty."
00:31:19.320 | But obviously, there are places in the world that there's not money falling all over the place.
00:31:23.320 | It's not the land of plenty.
00:31:25.320 | I'm curious, how would you translate some of what you think and believe in our U.S.-American or Canadian context
00:31:37.320 | into a context that's helpful around the world?
00:31:42.320 | Well, for now, I would say that's outside of my area of expertise and outside of my mission,
00:31:46.320 | because the secret mission of the Mr. Money Mustache blog is to reduce the rich countries of the world,
00:31:53.320 | their resource consumption.
00:31:55.320 | So the U.S. already has our material needs taken care of,
00:31:59.320 | and we have plenty of money to meet everybody's needs very, very well.
00:32:03.320 | Sometimes it's a distribution problem.
00:32:05.320 | Often there's a persuasion problem where people are persuaded to act not in their own best interests
00:32:10.320 | and to get themselves into debt and have horrible, crushing health conditions
00:32:16.320 | based on advertising stuff that's bad for you to eat and all these things.
00:32:20.320 | So my little strategy is to address the U.S. and Canadian and European market first.
00:32:27.320 | Whoever reads English and likes reading this blog about money and change our desires
00:32:32.320 | so we're not entirely focused on maximizing our material consumption as a proxy for happiness.
00:32:38.320 | And that will buy us some more time as a planet to not wreck the whole thing,
00:32:44.320 | and that will give time for the other people like the Gates Foundation type,
00:32:49.320 | people who are addressing true poverty, mostly in Africa and parts of India,
00:32:54.320 | to fix that side of the equation.
00:32:57.320 | Of course, the people there are fixing it for themselves too,
00:33:00.320 | but anything that the privileged people can do to help can sometimes be useful.
00:33:05.320 | So anyway, the solution to true poverty is stopping people's children from dying
00:33:11.320 | and helping women become part of the workforce
00:33:14.320 | and helping education become a meaningful thing in all these countries
00:33:17.320 | and also helping dictatorships stop.
00:33:19.320 | That's way above my pay grade.
00:33:21.320 | So I'm just focusing on getting Americans to destroy the planet less.
00:33:24.320 | And also, as you are less focused on your own personal pampering,
00:33:28.320 | all this money frees up and all this attention frees up
00:33:31.320 | because you're not on the high-income treadmill,
00:33:33.320 | and that gives people the intellectual freedom to turn to the rest of the world
00:33:37.320 | and be like, "Well, what do I do with all these millions of dollars of extra money?"
00:33:40.320 | So I think it will actually free up more money and brain power
00:33:44.320 | to address parts of the world where people really do suffer.
00:33:48.320 | So in a way, it can have a bigger effect than just making you or I retire early.
00:33:54.320 | I mean, the real picture is making the average happiness of all of humanity
00:33:58.320 | be better over the next, let's say, 100 years, if that's your goal.
00:34:02.320 | Yeah, but I don't have a big enough brain to think about the entire picture and work on it,
00:34:08.320 | so I just do my part-time role in it.
00:34:12.320 | Well, that's how it grows, each of us tending our own garden.
00:34:15.320 | And if you get enough people tending their own garden, it changes the community,
00:34:19.320 | you change the community, you have impact on other communities,
00:34:22.320 | and it has a ripple effect throughout the world.
00:34:24.320 | I want to thank you for the work that you do.
00:34:26.320 | I just want to publicly thank you.
00:34:28.320 | I think you've been a tremendous resource and benefit for so many people.
00:34:33.320 | Many of my listeners would credit your work with having a tremendous impact on their life.
00:34:38.320 | So keep up the great work.
00:34:40.320 | Cool. It's been a long time coming, this appearance on Radical Finance.
00:34:43.320 | I've been asking you for a long time.
00:34:46.320 | Thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it very much.
00:34:49.320 | Thank you.
00:34:50.320 | If this was the first time that you have become aware of Mr. Money Mustache
00:34:54.320 | by listening to this interview, two things.
00:34:56.320 | Number one, listen to the show that I'll do either tomorrow or sometime this week
00:35:00.320 | about his philosophy and his teaching.
00:35:02.320 | I'll summarize it for you very concisely.
00:35:04.320 | But head on over to MrMoneyMustache.com and check out some of Pete's articles.
00:35:09.320 | He is an incredibly skillful writer, very, very good writer.
00:35:14.320 | And he is so good at helping people think differently about many of their problems.
00:35:19.320 | So again, Pete's website is MrMoneyMustache.com.
00:35:22.320 | I think many of you will enjoy it.
00:35:24.320 | Thank you so much for listening to today's show. I hope you've enjoyed it.
00:35:26.320 | If this content has been helpful to you, please make sure to, number one, patronize today's sponsor.
00:35:32.320 | Again, HelloFresh, the meal delivery service.
00:35:35.320 | Make sure if you go to HelloFresh.com, use the promo code "RPF35"
00:35:38.320 | for $35 off the first week of delivery service when you subscribe to their service there at HelloFresh.
00:35:43.320 | Also, if you'd like to support the show directly and become a patron of the show,
00:35:46.320 | I would very much value and welcome you to that program.
00:35:49.320 | Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.
00:35:54.320 | Sign up to support the show directly there on that website.
00:35:57.320 | Thank you all so much for listening and I will be back with you very soon.
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